On Sacrifice Zones and Spaces Between Art and Academia: An Interview with Teresa Sanz

Teresa Sanz is a PhD researcher at Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB), interested in the links between environmental humanities and socioecological systems. Her research work explores the potential of artistic and cultural expressions to foster the work of environmental movements, especially those involved in energy transitions. Teresa is also a performing artist, and has set up art projects in the public and private domain.  

Her most recent performance project “En-Tierra Mineral” was screened at this year´s Arts & SDGS Online-Festival as part of Expo2020 Dubai and gives many insights into how art can inform research about spaces of ecological conflict. 

Image taken from: Under-ground Ore. Source: Teresa Sanz

 
C: Teresa, you joined the Clamor project two years ago to start your PhD at UAB., At the same time, you practice and practiced art before your PhD. How do you position yourself and your research in the intersection of art and academia, assuming that they both influence each other? 
 
T:. With everything I do I embody both art and academia somehow. What defines me in this space between art and environmental sciences, is my interest in non-professional artists. I specifically investigate art works created in public spaces and places of conflict, where an environment or a community is at stake.  
I am in a generation of young people who might have already lost hope. Things are getting worse with the return of fascism and the rise of climate change. So many injustices occur that it feels that change is in the hands of the powerful. This is why besides looking at results, we have to look at processes. In this sense, I got inspired by German poet and playwright Bertholdt Brecht who once said: Art is not the mirror hold up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it” In the process of building something, you create your own little reality. This reality is often more real than the world around it. 
 
C: And you think art is one way of looking at processes rather than outcomes? 
 
T: Yeah, I think if we want to understand what art does, then we have to look at processes of how to build something, not just at the outcome. I started to embody this idea when I worked on it first-hand. It was in the process or art making when I really understood that the transformation through art comes from the artistic process rather than from the final outcome, especially if you make audiences engage and participate in the piece somehow.  

Image taken from: Under-ground ore. Source: Teresa Sanz

Teresa in Bilbao. Source: Eneko Perez Arnaiz

C: What do you think are the impacts that art can have in environmental justice conflicts? 
 
T: First of all, if we want to challenge any extractive project we need to move, we need to stand up. This is how we mobilize ourselves. This is already where we need art. Art can really motivate people that did not think of themselves as protestors and activists. Art engages kids. Art can speak different languages. Artistic projects can make people meet and get to know each other. Art allows you say things that otherwise might be censored. Art makes you dream, and we are dead when we are not dreaming, as Emma Goldman said.  
When we talk about environmental conflicts specifically, I try to understand them in a way that what is at stake is place, and the people attached to that place. Art has a strong potential to build this place, materially and symbolically.  
 
C: I ask myself whether that might depend on the type of place, too. You worked at very specific places called Sacrifice Zones, so places where an ecosystem has collapsed due to extractive industries. What do you think makes those Sacrifice Zones subjects for arts? 
 
T: I think this question is like trying to understand why artists create. I have asked many artists why they create. Sometimes they create because they have the need to. They have an internal impulse and a feeling. It is really hard to understand why artists create in the first place.  
A Sacrifice Zone is a place devastated environmentally and socially, usually as a consequence of neoliberal industries. This means the place is dead. What art does is to bring life back to this place. It claims back the space for its people. This is the idea of Lefebvre in The Right to the City. Artists re-claim space for the people because corporations captured it for the sake of a neoliberal idea of development. This is a dialectical conflict, as the idea of development from corporations and governments conflicts with the idea of development from local people.  
I would like to bring another quote by Ursula Le Guin: “The purpose of art is to get us out of those routines.” This is a bit nihilistic and is assuming that our daily lives are terrifying and art brings us out of them. However, if you exit your routines through art and then go back to your daily life, this process can be quite powerful. The same applies to Sacrifice Zones, where art can bring you out of that place and then makes you re-enter this murdered place with much more purpose and life. 
 
C: Funny that you said that about death. I often think a dead place is a place of silence and nothingness, which means that artists can renew the place from scratch, unrestricted by any pre-existing infrastructure. You have also made a film called “Under-ground ore” about the Sacrifice Zone Quintero-Puchuncavi in Chile, which was screened at the Expo2020 Dubai and SDG film festival. Could you take us through the creative process of how this film evolved, and which insights you gained from this film? 
 
T: Three years ago, I lived in Chile and had the chance to visit the Sacrifice Zone Quintero-Puchuncavi. This place stayed with me ever since. I am from Bilbao, Basque country, the most polluted city of Europe during the industrialization in the 1980s, and it was in Chile, where I witnessed the image of extractivism and the role of external markets in local communities. 
I thus started to conceptualize a project. Initially, I did not want to make a film but a street action, an artistic intervention into public space. I was collaborating with the theatre collective Teatro en Movimiento Callejerx in Barcelona, where we did several feminist and political street actions. This group was founded in Chile and some of them were still there, in Valparaíso. So I got funding for travel and together we launched a street action laboratory at Quintero-Puchuncavi. 15 local activists and artists from the area signed up. We organized some improvisation games at the Sacrifice Zone, in front of the industries. It was very easy to find inspiration from the environment there, with all the extractive industries, the sand of the beach and the polluted sea. As a director, I just had to focus on the movements, and observed how the people would move. It was interesting to see how local people who experience the Sacrifice Zone firsthand would put their emotions into movements and action. This is how the script of movements was born. I then collected some second-hand clothes and some dead algi at the beach, and we recorded the performance.  

Image from “Under-ground ore”. Source: Teresa Sanz.

C: Are you writing an academic paper about this, too? 
 
T: Not really. I am writing one based on interviews in the area but not about the scenic action. The performance is not really academic. I did not want to theorize it that much. I think this would have ruined many things, as going somewhere as a researcher changes the way everyone is perceiving the project.  
 
C: Luckily action research is evolving, where the clear boundaries between research and activism are dissolved, and researchers acknowledge that they cannot be 100% objective all the time. Yet talking about science, is there something that you miss in the way academics engage with art? 
 
T: There are a lot of art theories, critics or art historians, and their work is important. However, they focus too much on professional art, rather than non-professional art. Art is often viewed as an institution that is far away from normal people and their daily lives. This is not true. There are many artistic projects that are not planned by curators and galleries, but which are pushed by people who want to change things.  
This brings us to this discussion of what is arts and what not. There are many people doing creative things and they have a strong impact to this world. Yet, there is only attention to the people who call it art and who contribute to galleries and the art market.  
Finally, I have problems with the way environmental researchers look at art. I think it is quite difficult to study arts. Environmental researchers want to see how arts reduces CO2-emissions…but you cannot translate what happens in an artistic project into numbers and statistics. It involves different senses, different rhythms. An artistic process is a research process, but it has a different flow than science. Art is the opposite of productivity. Maybe I can end with a quote by Eugène Ionesco “If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless, and the uselessness of the useful, then one cannot understand art”.  

“Under-ground ore” is a scenic action that address the devastation in one of the largest Sacrifice Zones in Chile. Directed by Teresa Sanz.

The interview was conducted by Julian Willming.